This reminds me of the scene in Margin Call [1] when the analyst discovers that their assumptions for the risk of highly leveraged positions are inaccurate.
> Indeed, the stronger explanation for Times New Roman’s long reign isn’t aesthetic excellence, but practicality and inertia. Times New Roman was among the small set of typefaces bundled with early versions of Windows. It was also promoted as “web-safe,” meaning webmasters could reasonably assume it would render properly across platforms. In the early era of digitalization, choosing Times New Roman was often less a deliberate endorsement than a default imposed by limited options. Over time, the habit hardened into a standard, and institutions began to require it without much reflection, effectively borrowing their own authority to confer authority upon the typeface.
> And why is grit such a good indicator of successful founders?
Based on what? Biographical accounts by successful founders?
Nassim Taleb's Fooled By Randomness [1] covers the topic of mis-attribution of some causal factor X (i.e. grit) to some phenomena (i.e. business success) that can be effectively explained solely by randomness. In the specific case of successfully starting a business, causal factors are often mis-attributed post-facto through a lens that blatantly ignores survivorship bias [2].
is grit not required to make it to land in the survivorship bias pool? If your first failure is too hard on you and you quit, then, by definition, you can't succeed. Maybe grit doesn't count when everything goes your way always. I'm not sure anyone has experienced success without grit, but I could be entertained by anecdotes.
First you need agriculture so people tend to settle in one place. After ag comes more specialization, farmers need houses, graineries, and as society grows social specialists in which we'd call government.
These things in an area typically cause the area to grow because of their stability. As they grow you get more than one person/business doing the same line of work and you get more people than fit in ones monkeysphere. At that size you may not know a person that knows what you need to know and start looking further. This is why as cities grow advertising itself becomes an emergent property. Just go to a Roman city and look for dick pavers for example. Then someone will think "Hey, I can give some poor kids a board with a message on it and have them cry out to go to the place that people pay me to advertise" and suddenly you have an emergent property of humanity.
I (mis)attributed an element of pre-destination to the word emergent that apparently doesn't map to the word properly used.
That said, there's a petroglyph (circa 1150-1600 CE) of a macaw (among other sign-like petroglyphs)[1] on the walls above the pueblo ruins in Frijoles Canyon in Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico that came to mind when reading your explanation. The pueblo ruins themselves are immediately above an agriculturally developed riverbed floodplain with structures previously used for food storage.
It doesn't seem too far fetched to analogize a macaw above a pueblo in a canyon to, say, a flamingo on a neon sign (Circa 20th century)[2] above a bar along a highway, or an ad on a phone in 2025. Perhaps advertising is emergent (and, dare I say, with an element of pre-destination).
This feels like one of those moments where you're witnessing history be made in real-time. And I hate it.
It takes approximately zero effort to see how this could be both monetized and used for harm. This episode of Black Mirror is writing itself and congratulating itself in the comments.
At what point is the internet just ... dead? AI posts with AI comments generated for the sole purpose of spamming affiliate links to drop-shipped products we don't need to generate ephemeral satisfaction in fulfilling our purpose as an economics unit of consumption? Where do I sign up for the beta?
I think this kid's mom was mentioned in the Atlantic article [1] the link in the post is based on.
> Other accommodations risk putting the needs of one student over the experience of their peers. One administrator told me that a student at a public college in California had permission to bring their mother to class. This became a problem, because the mom turned out to be an enthusiastic class participant.
David Foster Wallace made a similar argument about Television being able to absorb, re-contextualize, and subsequently market any effort opposed to it as a cause of malignant addiction and abdication of societal responsibilities in his essay E. Unibus Pluram.
Today you can probably substitute television for YouTube, TikTok, etc, but the argument still holds up, perhaps better than ever.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAWtcYOVbWw
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